At 07:39 PM 7/28/01 -0500 Dan Minette wrote:
>I thought about the easiest way to do this, and have
>decided to start with considering the paradigm science: classical
>mechanics/universal gravitation (CM/UG). It has the advantage of being the
>first real science, and containing pretty much all that one finds in
>science.
>
>Without going into a great deal of history, let me just make the following
>observations about CM/UG.
>
>1) It assumes that the objects under study act according to laws of nature,
>not according to volition
I don't think that this is valid, because to me, it excludes biologists,
especially zoologists. Animals act according to volition, also, as has
been demonstrated in numerous experiments, yet nobody has yet suggested
that Biologists, Zoologists, and Animal Behaviorists are not scientists.
If you'd like to make the case that they are not, I guess that is fine, but
I seem to think that you do not.
Additionally, there is no "why" for this criterion. UG/CM applies
perfectly well to human beings, even when acting under our own volition.
Just because I choose to jump out of a plane without a parachute, UG/CM
still applies.
>2) It is empirically based
>2) CM/UG is totally based on observation. Internal reflection is not used
>at all. There is no privledged access to internal states, as there is with
>the social sciences.
I'm not sure that I understand this. You just used a thought-experiment
in your explanation of #1. Or was that just not science? ;-)
Additionally, although Economists spend a great deal of time thinking,
there is a huge emphasis on data collection. I use introspection a great
deal on this List, because the List format is more suited for it.
Moreover, was UG/CM developed completely without introspection? Pure
empiricism is nice once you have the Laws to test, but how are these Laws
developed in the first place? Or was the development of UG/CM not part of
science?
Finally, I think that you and I both agree that there are a lot of
Economists who engage in a lot of empirical observation. So, there seems
to be a large sub-sector of Economists that meet this requirement.
>3) It is experimentally based.
See above. The empiricists are also engaged in experiments.
>4) It makes broad predictions from a few basic principals
In a way, all of Economics is essentially reducible to the Law of Supply
and Demand.
You can't get much more broad than that.
In fact, I found this category funny, because one of the great attractions
of Economics to me, when I decided to switch my focus from Geology to
Economics was how much of Economics could be derived from so little.
>5) It makes precise predictions
Actually, Economics does make precise predictions when it has precise data.
In computer simulations, the predictions are very precise. I don't think
that you want to argue that Economics is not a science simply because it is
hard. ....in this case, just hard to get precise data. After all, the
lack of precise data has troubled many other areas of science since its
inception.
>6) It is reductionistic
See #4.
Indeed, Economics is famous for assessing large economic interactions by
simulating the actions of an economy with only one or two people. In this
case, individuals are our atoms.
At any rate, #6 is almost identical to #4.
>7) It is synthetic
>7) Great theories of physics put together different fields that are not
>always clearly linked.
Although this is nice, I don't think that this can be a *requirement* of
science. After all , if it is reductionistic, then in theory, science
could simply have made its discoveries from the bottom up. The fact that
different fields were not clearly linked is simply an artificat of history,
and would not necessarily be repeated in other worlds that developed
science.
>8) It is falsifiable by additional experiments
>Not very well. A good example of this is the argument over the factors
>involved in the Great Depression.
In part, that is ebcause this is a single historical event, and we do not
have perfect data from that historical period. Putative causes of
depression (small "d"), can, however be falsified by additional experiements.
Another great example is Amartya Sen, who took the theory that famines are
random events produced by crop failures, and falsified it by examining the
data.
>9) It survives as a special case of the newer theory
Well, given that EM was only derived from QED in the last 50-75 years, I'm
not going to worry myself too much that we haven't gotten that far yet.
#9 fails as a requirement of science, because under this criterion, you can
never know if you are doing science until the field is very mature.
Indeed, a great many of your requirements Dan, seem to me to be possibly
linked to the fact that the Universe began as a single point in the Big
Bang. Thus, it is not surprising that there are a few underlying
principles to the entire Universe.
I wonder, however, how closely any of the other Sciences might be able to
match these nine criterion.
As I have been thinking about this discussion, it occurs to me that there
is a profound difference between myself, and the deniers of Economics'
status a science. This difference can be expressed through a corny
analogy - I view science as a process, you view science as a destination.
You seem to judge science based mostly on "post facto" criteria.
This poses some strange difficulties for your definition, however. After
all, was Newton a scientist before he developed CM/UG? It seems to me
silly to argue that he was not - but your entire presentation would leave
us with that conclusion. Newton in the days before CM/UG would have had a
hard time meeting most of the criteria on your list.
Also, let us consider the case of scientists who have studied astrology.
Yes, there have been such scientists. These scientists have made
predictions, and demonstrated that almost every single one of them have
failed. As such, these scientists concluded that there was no merit in
the theories of astrology and moved on to other pursuits (or a career as a
writer of popular science. :) Yet again, these scientists would not have
met most of the criteria on your List (or at least as many criteria as
Economists do.)
So, in other words, although your description of the wonders of UG/CM is
very nice and all, it seems to me to fail pretty badly at beign a
definition for science.
JDG
__________________________________________________________
John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - ICQ #3527685
We are products of the same history, reaching from Jerusalem and
Athens to Warsaw and Washington. We share more than an alliance.
We share a civilization. - George W. Bush, Warsaw, 06/15/01
